Introducing Get Satisfaction Mobile

Get Satisfaction is designed to help you be wherever your customers are — and increasingly that’s on mobile devices! In fact, the number of mobile visitors to Get Satisfaction communities has more than quadrupled over the past year. And on a percentage basis, it’s almost doubled (from 8% of visitors last year to 15% this year). So the need for mobile support is growing fast!

With that in mind, we’re very excited to announce the public beta release of Get Satisfaction Mobile! Your customers will now experience a mobile optimized web experience when accessing your community from a supported mobile device. This feature is now available at no additional cost on all paid plans.

Read on to learn about some of the highlights of the new mobile solution.

I Need An Answer Now!

Context is incredibly important when it comes to designing user experiences. And mobile is a great example of how dramatically different context can be when users try to access a Get Satisfaction community.

For instance, your customers could be sitting in their car doing a Google search as they’re re-evaluating which diaper brand they’ll buy, sitting at the bus stop trying to report a problem with a social game they just downloaded, or standing in an aisle of a grocery store trying to get a question answered about the store’s return policy. The context of those interactions is very different than sitting at a desk at the office. With mobile, you’re at the point of need — and getting resolution to your issue within moments is critical.

We focused the design of the mobile web app to best help on-the-go mobile users reach resolution as quickly as possible with a minimum of typing and clicks:

Most relevant topics displayed by default: On the mobile community landing page, users can browse through answered questions, solved problems, in-progress and planned ideas, and recent praise with a quick swipe of their finger.

Asking a question is front-and-center: If one of the highlighted topics doesn’t meet your customer’s needs, it’s obvious what they should do next — ask their question! We present them with relevant results (as we do on the web, in our widgets, and on Facebook) to further increase the likelihood that they get an answer without doing any additional typing. And if they can’t find a similar topic, they can easily create a new one.

Joining the conversation is just a button click away: When a user finds a topic that addresses their need, it’s easy for them to get engaged via the action bar that is always present on topic detail views. User’s can me-too, follow, share, or reply to the topic, keeping them in the loop as the community helps to resolve topics.

Nothing to Install

There’s nothing for you or your customers to install to get started. When a user tries to visit your community from a supported mobile device, we automatically redirect them to the mobile version of your community.

Streamlined Login Experience

Authentication is often the biggest point of friction in any user experience. We’ve tried to minimize that friction by taking a fresh look at the mobile web authentication experience. We first limited the number of login options to three — Facebook, Google, and Get Satisfaction — as these are by far the most used across all communities. Second, we made both Facebook and Google true one-click logins by removing the need to prompt users for their email address in an extra step. We expect this more streamlined login flow to decrease abandonment and increase engagement in communities.

Automatic Capture of Device Information

The first question that many companies have for users that post topics in their community is what device they’re using. Fortunately, we capture that for you automatically! We now capture and display user agent information right on the topic in the moderation sidebar. This allows you to see what mobile device and browser the user posted the topic from, saving both you and your users a step in reaching resolution.

Browser Support & Availability

The mobile web app is available immediately on all paid plans. The app currently supports iPhone and iPod devices. We’ll soon be adding support for Android. Stay tuned for updates as we add new features during the beta period.

What Do You Think?

Grab your iPhone or iPod Touch and give it a whirl by accessing your community or try it out in ours — http://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfaction. And as always, let us know what you think in our community!

It works great via Safari on my iPod touch, but it does not work within our App Store app (we have it open in a UIWebView window). It just shows a grey screen with a GetSatisfaction logo popups up for a second. Please fix this ASAP! Currently it does not work.

Thanks for the feedback. Embedding it in a UIWebView isn’t supported right now. Alternatively, you can just link the user to Safari, which is what other app developers have done. What app are you working on?

At the moment we had to have the mobile version of GetSatisfaction turned off (so it shows the desktop version) as it didn’t work within the UIVIew. We are very keen for this issue to be resolved so we can have the mobile view turned on again.

Drop me an email if you like. I’d be happy to provide a promo code for our app for you to download and see if it helps.

Hey Sandra, Great idea. No, we don’t support photo uploads to posts right now. Definitely a use-case we’re aware of. Feel free to post this in our community for us to keep better track of (http://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfaction). Thanks, Steve

Great to see a mobile version – when will it be Android compatible? We would like to use GS on our mobile website but the vast majority of our users have Android handsets, iThings only account for 5% of traffic.

Don’t have a date to share at this point. We have a few other product initiatives ahead of adding Android support — most notably adding SSO support. But Android is definitely a high priority for us. Appreciate the question!

Hey Chris, The user needs to open Safari right now. We’re looking into adding support for UIWebViews soon (i.e. which would allow the user to stay entirely in your app). I’d actually be interested in hearing more about what you guys are trying to achieve to inform what we’re doing, so I’ll follow-up by email as well. Appreciate the question. Thanks, Steve

Why limit it to iPhone and Android? Why not just have a mobile version of the site such as m.getsatisfaction.com.

There are tens of millions of Blackberry users and places like India have a lot more Blackberry devices than iPhones. Just because Americans have gone iPhone crazy doesn’t mean there aren’t hundreds of millions of other smart phone users around.

It gets a bit tedious everyone constantly pandering to the Big Apple. Whatever happened to supporting people across the board. Why restrict things to a single type of phone? That’s a bit monocultural don’t you think?

@Paul – Thanks for the comment. To answer your first question, we actually do have a mobile version of the site at m.getsatisfaction.com. That’s what this announcement was referring to. If you access a community (like our own at https://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfaction) on an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll be redirected to the mobile version. To address your other concerns, it’s definitely not our intention to only support iPhone. It was just what we initially launched with given that iPhone’s represent a disproportionate percentage of traffic compared to other mobile devices accessing Get Satisfaction communities. We’re going to be working on expanding support for other types of phones in the near future. Thanks again for reading and commenting!

@Matthew – The Satisfaction Remote project was developed by an independent developer, so we never officially supported it. I don’t think the developer has been keeping it up-to-date. But you could certainly reach out to them. We currently don’t have the capability to change the look and feel of the mobile experience, but it’s something that’s on our roadmap. Thanks for asking!

3 Pings/Trackbacks for "Introducing Get Satisfaction Mobile"

[…] currently optimized for iPhone devices. Android on the way!Get more detail from our product managers on the product blog:Get Satisfaction is designed to help you be wherever your customers are — and increasingly […]

[…] redirect them to the mobile version of [the] community,” Get Satisfaction said in a blog post announcing the new app. At launch, the app will only redirect customers accessing Get Satisfaction communities […]

[…] Get Satisfaction provides businesses a third-party web-based customer support service. The service got an HTML5 mobile makeover this week. Businesses with paid plans now have a mobile Get Satisfaction presence for customers who use an iPhone or iPod touch. Introducing Get Satisfaction Mobile […]